Wednesday, August 17, 2011 10:11 pm

Rant of the day …

I cannot describe to you the Libertarian Shrug that says some people just have to die, okay, that I get from people these days. Some people just have to die so that a private company can have this contract. Some people just have to die so that I don’t have to think about their systemic disadvantage, poverty and want. Some people just have to die so that we don’t have to get it together as a society and suck it up and realize that [expletive]s who game the system don’t matter and we need to take care of everybody else. Some people just have to die.

If they wanted to live, they should have been fortunate enough to have rich relatives or friends with free time who could drive them to every single doctor’s appointment, because that’s something you can totally guarantee in your life at all times.

But never me. Never mine. Never anyone I know and never anyone I love. That’s an outrage. That’s a crime. That’s the entire [expletive] [expletive] blue POINT: It’s always someone you love. It’s always someone that somebody loves. It’s always you. Our fate is your fate.

Living in a society brings with it many benefits. (And if you doubt me, you just go ahead and take your God-given Galtian gifts and decamp to someplace in north-central Alaska in January and start creating jobs. Go on. I’ll wait.)

But it also brings with it a number of obligations, explicit and implicit. The explicit ones are all on the Internet, and everyone fortunate enough not to have been born in a barn or raised in a war zone has had the implicit ones inculcated into them from birth, even if they sometimes choose to act otherwise.

You can believe in God or not, but whether you do or not, it is an empirical fact and not just, say, the teaching of Christ that we are all in this together. A vanishingly small number of us can use our money and our selfishness to build little fortresses within which to try to deny reality, maybe even leave the country (Oh, and, um, Peter Thiel, you don’t have to build an island paradise with lots of guns and no rules. There’s already one out there. It’s called Haiti.), but ultimately you’ve got no place you can run and hide. Your climate is changing just the same as everyone else’s and your air is getting just as dirty as everyone else’s. The monsters will come for you, too; it just might take them a little longer to get you. And know that if you die before they get you, your children will not escape them.

It is true that we lack the logistics, and maybe even the money, to save the entire world. But America, whether blessed by God or just the winner of the cosmic lottery, does have the money and logistics to save its own people and many others besides. Maybe we can’t save everyone, but we can save a helluva lot more than we’re saving now without seriously inconveniencing anyone (and that doesn’t even get into the thorny moral question of whether, just maybe, WE OUGHT TO BE SERIOUSLY INCONVENIENCED). It’s not a money problem, it’s an attitude problem and a cultural problem: We have a culture that has decided that IGMFY is admirable. And you don’t have to read the Bible to know where that leads. History will suffice.